Difficulty
If someone will tell me that Dark Souls is a difficult series of games I would laugh into their face. Because I played Fractured Furry Tales made by Imagitec Design.
I died for about forty times in the first thirty seconds of the first level. Twenty of them on the same enemy.
Difficulty is the defining part of Fractured Furry Tales. It’s impossible to enjoy Jaguar’s Bubsy because of how punishing this game is. In my personal opinion only someone really hardcore or a masochist (often the same thing) can enjoy it. I’m dropping my title of being one. The level of punishment for any actions you take over here is absurd.
Sorry all the games I called out for being difficult. This one is on a different level.
It has:
– Enemies that appear from the side of the screen and slice you on halves through almost the whole screen in the next few frames. (Knights). But sometimes they just do nothing and have no reaction.
– Enemies that literally appear from thin air to kill you without giving you opportunity to avoid being hit. (Cheshire cat). But sometimes they attack a random spot far from you.
– Enemies with projectiles faster than Sonic. (Egg throwing snakes). Sometimes they don’t react on you and just play with their eggs.
– Enemies that just fast and give you no room to avoid them. (Ants)
– Enemies that are fast and flying. (Hornets). They are manageable one on one but sometimes game spawns three of them at the same time and if you hit one it just throws you onto the stings of others.
Also when you need to jump up through a platforming section they may appear from nowhere and kill you midair while you have no physical ability to avoid death.
– Enemies that are able to strike in all directions (Kids). They literally have no cooldown on their electrocuting yo-yos. In addition to yo-yos they kill you with air balloons if you try to jump over them.
Why Bubsy dies from Air Balloons? Well, canonically Bubsy dies from anything.
– Water. A lot of blind jumps or just jumps or lack of attention end up with Bubsy touching the water and drowning.
– When you jump you preserve inertia even if moving in the opposite direction. But there is a trick – you can use Bubsy’s flying mode to negate this inertia. You just need to react fast enough because Bubsy is as fast as Sonic.
In other words you die a lot in this game. Really a lot. You even start with 9 lives, like a typical cat.
After the first fifty deaths I just started to save scam, because otherwise it would take me days to beat the first chapter and see the first boss.
Never expected to say it but Bubsy in Claws Encounters is noticeably simpler with the same one hit death mechanic.
Visuals and music
After a pot of pure pain to consume I would like to mention at least something good about Fractured Furry Tales. Visuals are great.
The only problem – they feel soulless.
Developers just converted tales from the children’s books into enemies and backgrounds without any fantasy on top. They did it like a boring task instead of making something epic.
For example the first chapter is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice even mentioned in the title. But there is no Alice. Only Bubsy.
There are no environmental storytelling as well. What’s the point of these visuals then? Just to have something because you need to fill your sprites?
Enemies are just characters from the book. And that’s it.
Even more – some of these enemies will be reused later. Considering different nature of books developers used for inspiration – it doesn’t make any sense.
Why to tailor the game to tales if you don’t tell any stories? Craziness of original Bubsy’s game visual design felt much better.
Boss of the Alice’s part is The Hatter in a giant teapot on trucks. And he is boring both as a boss and as a concept.
Hatter shoots rockets and upon death just rides away. It feels lazy.
I have a feeling the developers decided to take this route because they had a lot of artists but complete lack of programmers.
Music is good; it adds epic adventure vibes. But sound is just boring farts.
Humor
Bubsy’s death animations are very short. Since the first game they took a special place in the universe. Like in Looney Tunes Bubsy should die dramatically.
Some death animations are so fast you don’t even notice what happened. For example the death by free fall. Half a second and Fractured Furry Tales shows you a black screen with the level’s title. No time to even comprehend the situation.
At the same time animation of Bubsy’s high speed none fatal wall hit is notoriously long and you have no option to interrupt it.
You can hear the Bubsy’s voice in the start of the levels when the level’s title is presented. But there is no iconic “what can possibly go wrong?”.
Instead for the second chapter Bubsy says “Pilot’s license. What’s for?”. It sounds like a random lazy reuse of the voiceover of the previous game. I remember this phrase one to one.
The second chapter is inspired by Jack and the Beanstalk and has no relation to airplanes.
I have doubts Imagitec Design even tried to understand what Bubsy is about and the driving force behind it. And it is just sad.
It’s surprising that they had more than twenty games in their portfolio and aside from Bubsy I never heard about any of them.
Timer and the gameplay
In addition to difficulty Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales has probably the worst implementation of level timer. I would argue even about the need of this timer to exist. But sadly it’s there.
Fractured Furry Tales gives you ten minutes for a level.
Levels are long. But you’ll be dying all the time anyway and this will constantly reset the timer, right? Wrong. Timer is saved per checkpoint. So if you hit a checkpoint at the last minute then you might appear in the situation where you physically can’t reach the end of the level in this time.
Even more – the game memorizes which enemies are dead. So in theory you can kill all the enemies without touching the checkpoints, then die and get your ten minutes back and a level cleaned from enemies.
Levels are long and have a none linear structure with tunnels and gates.
There are very well hidden levers that open these gates. For example on the Alice’s levels you often need to notice a mushroom or the tea cups stuck in the air forming paths leading upwards to the levers.
In other words what in other games are ways to hide secrets in Jaguar’s Bubsy is a way to hide levers you need to use to complete levels.
Fractured Furry Tales enjoys to shift your perception of platformers in general. I want to remind you that the first Bubsy game was released after Sonic and there were enough examples to make things right.
What are your usual thoughts about seeing the moving platforms? Especially when you played a lot and currently on the fifth level and seeing a moving platform for the first time? Cool, this game has moving platforms! And for some reason they appeared only now. Platforms might be used to get you to bonuses or farther into the level.
Yeah, you jump onto a platform, pick a bonus and then die because of the spikes that were right after the bonus and the first platform you encountered kindly moved you right into these spikes.
You’re seeing spikes for the first time. You don’t even know yet about such threat in the game. And they already trap you.
That’s extremely poor game design. You need to think twice about every important feature you introduce.
Instead Fractured Furry Tales just kills you. That’s it. That’s the game.
It doesn’t give you time to accommodate yourself to new mechanics and general flow of the game. It just punishes you for each action you take. You start to fear everything new, move slower.
But don’t worry, Fractured Furry Tales won’t give you time to react anyway, even if you progress cautiously.
You’ll die. That’s just how this game is.
Is Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales fun?
I believe there are people who enjoy this game.
I enjoy difficult games where your skills matter and you have a skill progression.
I played a lot of platformers including other Bubsy games.
I didn’t enjoy Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales at all. At some point I just accepted my faith and played exclusively to write this article.
Before the release of Bubsy 4D, people usually associated Bubsy games with Bubsy 3D. As someone who played both I must say Bubsy 3D is not the worst game among Bubsy titles.
It’s just happened that Bubsy 3D is the most well known game in the series.
Fractured Furry Tales managed to sell 9000 copies. While Bubsy 3D sold 200000 copies by raw estimations. That’s why no one knows much about the first one.
What’s even more sad is that Fractured Furry Tales has potential. The game has nice art and music. It’s other aspects that kill all the joy. Aspects that shouldn’t be so hard to fix.
Developers should have thought about how to make Fractured Furry Tales actually fun to play. Instead they just made what they made. Probably, that’s what separates good game developers from bad ones.
Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales doesn’t even feel like a Bubsy game. It feels like someone tried to mimic Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind and failed at it.
First Bubsy game made me smile and laugh, second had more variety in gameplay. This one I don’t even want to remember.